The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) has announced publication of the ANSI/ASABE S640 standard entitled “Quantities and Units of Electromagnetic Radiation for Plants (Photosynthetic Organisms).” The work is the first in an expected three-prong effort of standards development by ASABE that can forward the proliferation of LED-based horticultural lighting. Solid-state lighting (SSL) is increasingly important to horticulture in both vertical farms and as supplemental under-cover applications in greenhouses, and the standards effort is intended to provide a common language for characterizing LED-based systems relative to plants.

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The standards effort for characterizing LED-based lighting for humans has been underway for a decade or more now. But basic metrics such as efficacy (lm/W) that are directly applicable to humans, since the lumen is based on human visual sensitivity, have little applicability to the effectiveness of light for plant growth. That issue is one we have covered in a number of articles including a feature last September.